Why is it that when you stand in front of a flat mirror, your image is reversed horizontally (left-right) but remains the same vertically (up-down)? — CC, Martinsville, NJ
A mirror doesn’t really flip your image horizontally or vertically. After all, the image of your head is still on top and the image of your left hand is still on the left. What the mirror does flip is which way your image is facing. For example, if you were facing north, then your image is facing south. This front-back reversal makes your image fundamentally different from you in the same way a left shoe is fundamentally different from a right shoe. No matter how you arrange those two shoes, they’ll always be reversed in one direction. Similarly, no matter how you arrange yourself and your image, they’ll always be reversed in one direction.
While you’re looking at your image, the reversed direction is the forward-backward direction. But it’s natural to imagine yourself in the place of your image. To do this you imagine turning around to face in the direction that your image is facing. When you turn in this manner, you mentally eliminate the forward-backward reversal but introduce a new reversal in its place: a left-right reversal. If you were to imagine standing on your head instead, you would still eliminate the forward-backward reversal but would now introduce an up-down reversal. Since it’s hard to imagine standing on your head in order to face in the direction your image is facing, you tend to think only about turning around. It’s this imagined turning around that leads you to say that your image is reversed horizontally.